Protest Gone Off the Rails
The practice of taking protest beyond the public square to the homes and private lives of public officials and their families breaks with a long and honorable tradition of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience that runs through Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. “The point of civil disobedience is to break unjust laws civilly and justly. To be jailed for doing the right thing draws attention to the injustice of the law and the system that executes it” (Filia, The Problem).
Mass demonstrations, protest marches, the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, marches on Washington and elsewhere for a variety of causes, and so on have not always been as peaceful as we would like or as supporters billed them, but they now seem like quaint relics of a fading past, when protesters put themselves on the line to draw attention to the rightness of their cause and thereby appeal to the moral sensibility of their fellow citizens. It should be noted that there is also a tradition of dismissal by more radical comrades who saw this approach as naïve and ineffectual.
I do not know exactly where or when to mark the beginning of the transition to forms of protest distinguished by harassment and intimidation of public officials and their families rather than by appeal to a moral sensibility. It is beyond the scope of this essay to trace in detail the roots of the new protest paradigm to the deterioration of social order and coarsening of civic life, where for some time norms of decency and civility have given way to bitterness, resentment, and tropes of victimization. Suggestion that the Trump era is when it really blew up may sound like beating a dead horse, except that this horse is alive and continues its own kicking.
The pandemic disrupted everything and prompted unpopular measures to provide for public safety, implemented in good faith but not always consistently and wisely in the scramble to acquire knowledge about the new disease. In 2020 people and groups agitated by covid restrictions, lockdowns, and mask mandates took their protest to the homes of city council members, mayors, state legislators, and governors.
On an August night during the season of largely peaceful protests in 2020 more than 200 largely peaceful people gathered at Portland mayor Ted Wheeler’s Pearl District condominium.
Some in the crowd lit a fire in the street, then placed a picnic table from a nearby business on top of the fire to feed the blaze. People shattered windows and broke into a ground-floor dental office, taking items including a chair, also added to the fire, and office supplies.
Shortly after 11 p.m., a bundle of newspapers was set ablaze and thrown into a ground-floor storefront in the residential building.
…
The 16-story building contains 114 residences. The fire didn’t appear to spread and was quickly extinguished. (Hale, Nakamura, March to Portland Mayor Ted Wheele’s home declared riot)
On January, 4, 2021, protesters gathered outside the home of Josh Hawley “chanting and shouting through a megaphone, walking up to his doorstep, waving signs and writing on the sidewalk with chalk” to voice their objection to his intention to object when Congress convened on January 6 to certify the election of Joe Biden as president. The protesters were reportedly “peaceful and they left when police explained they were violating local picketing laws.” Hawley referred to them as “Antifa scumbags” and accused them of threatening his family. According to a police spokesman, “There were no issues, no arrests. We didn’t think it was that big of a deal.” (Balsamo, Police: Protesters outside)
The targets of these protests fall across the political spectrum: Hawley and Lindsey Graham on the right, liberals Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, administration officials Jake Sullivan and Lloyd Austin, and Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett are examples mentioned by Politico Magazine senior editor and columnist Michael Schaffer in an article about a particularly ugly turn taken by Occupy Blinken activists at an encampment known as Kibbutz Blinken, which as the name suggests lies outside the home of Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Antony Blinken’s Family).
The Times of Israel provocatively described the Occupy Blinken activists who accuse Blinken of war crimes and genocide as “far-left pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters” (TOI staff, ‘Kibbutz Blinken’). One tactic is to splash fake blood onto cars as they pull into Blinken’s driveway. Schaffer recounted an incident where the car carried not Blinken or his wife but their two children, ages three and four. This was no accident. The children were deliberately targeted.
“Entire neighborhoods have been bombed to the ground with children missing under rubble,” Hazami Barmada, the encampment’s organizer, told me. “Why are those children forced to understand the brutal, barbaric realities of war, when his children should be sanitized from it?”
As the car carrying the kids rolled up, the group took their places. Some shouted: “YOUR FATHER IS A BABY KILLER!” Some waved signs: “WAR CRIMINAL BLOODY BLINKEN LIVES HERE.”…
A few denizens of the encampment hoisted gallon jugs of bright-red liquid and poured the contents out on the street in front of the vehicle. (Shaffer, Antony Blinken’s Family)
Shaffer reported that no one could tell if the children had any reaction to it all. “But,” he wrote, “the fact that we even have to ponder the merits of strangers yelling at preschoolers is a sign of something troubling in our political culture—something that existed long before the Gaza war.”
I am familiar with feelings of frustration, helplessness, and responsibility that can give rise to the sense that one must do something, almost anything. But not just anything. Targeting children is wrong, no matter how worthy the cause or how passionately protesters feel about it.
Arab Americans, Muslims, and the rest of us are right to be outraged by an Israeli assault on Gaza that goes far beyond self-defense. We would be presented with a terrible moral choice if there were reason to believe that the traumatization of the children of American officials might lead to a cessation of hostilities. There is none.
Schaffer asks, “Do these protests help the protesters’ cause? And, beyond that, do they move society in a direction that boosts the activists’ own idea of justice?” The answer is a firm “no.” They are more likely to harden hearts and minds than to change them. How we comport ourselves matters if we harbor any slender hope that we might move society in a direction that advances our idea of what is right and just.
Moreover, Washington does not have nearly as much influence on Israel as these activists and other administration critics appear to believe. The president and secretary of state do not call the shots in Gaza or the West Bank, nor in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. They are trying to rein in Israel with dismal lack of success. That country under the leadership of Bibi Netanyahu is a rogue state that recognizes no limits on its conduct. The administration’s calculation is that taking a harder line would be likely to result in a deeper rupture with Netanyahu and lessened US influence. Biden and Blinken are dealing with a dynamic that has confronted and infuriated other US presidents and secretaries of state since Netanyahu first came to power.
Frustrated by the lecture he'd received on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict during his first meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, President Bill Clinton exploded to aides afterward— "Who's the f***ing superpower here?" (Miller, Who’s Afraid)
Another aspect of the new protest paradigm lies in its effect on the broader political culture . As Schaffer explains,
The United States in 2024 is not just a democracy grappling with some big disagreements. It’s a place that’s living with a fear of violence and upheaval that feels entirely new to many of its citizens. A hammer-wielding extremist really did assault Pelosi’s husband at their home. A pro-choice gunman really did show up at Kavanaugh’s residence. The Capitol Police have reported threats to lawmakers across the spectrum. As far as anyone knows, none of this was done by organized protesters. Yet they, like all of us, work against the American civic backdrop of anxiety and panic.
We have no assurance that anything we do will have an effect on the civic backdrop of anxiety and panic. There is no roadmap to bridge the profound differences and disagreements that divide us into mutually incomprehensible camps. Our efforts as individuals feel terribly small and inconsequential next to the horror of what is happening in Gaza and Ukraine and the threat to American democracy here at home. But someone has to start somewhere.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
References and Related Reading
Michael Balsamo, Police: Protesters outside Sen. Hawley’s home were peaceful, AP, January 5, 2021
Andrew Fiala, The Problem of Protesting at People’s Homes, American Philosophical Association Blog, May 27, 2020
Jamie Hale, Beth Nakamura, March to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s home declared riot Monday as burning debris thrown into building: Key takeaways, OregonLive/The Oregonian, September 4, 2020
Aaron David Miller, Who’s Afraid of Joe Biden? Not Benjamin Netanyahu, CNN, November 24, 2020
Mimi Montgomery, Protesters camp outside Antony Blinken's house to demand ceasefire, Axios, February 6, 2024
Michael Schaffer, Antony Blinken’s Family Is the Latest Target of Washington’s Ugliest Protest Trend, Politico, February 16, 2024
TOI staff, ‘Kibbutz Blinken’: Activists camp outside secretary’s home, accuse him of genocide, Times of Israel, February 3, 2024